The Story (part one)
If you know the way to San Jose, California, follow it for a most unusual experience. San Jose's Winchester House is not only a spooky mansion, it was spooked to begin with. It was built as a home for ghosts.
Gargantuan in size, the structure is not only dark, dank, and drafty as befits a spirit abode, but its chill factors have terrestrial justification as well. It is no longer economically feasible to heat a home that sprawls over six acres, contains 160 rooms, forty stairways, three elevators, forty-seven fireplaces, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, and more closets, turrets, and crannies than one can remember two minutes after hearing their numbers.
Located fify miles southeast of San Francisco, the Winchester Mystery House's main claim to fame in the realm of hypernormal homesteads goes beyond and attributes as form and frigidity. It is probably the only one of its kind in that it was built by architectural madates emanating from "the other side."
To comply with those dictates took a program that went on daily for thirty-eight years (1885-1922), at a cost of five and a half million dollars, and changed a former belle from New Haven, Connecticut, into a western recluse.
Sarah Pardee was the name of the woman who was controlled by a battalion of spirits whose whims had to be satisfied to confuse "the enemies." And she might have refused to marry William Wirt Winchester, of the family associated with the famous rifle, had she been able to foresee how that weapon would curse her life.
Labeled as "The Gun That Won the West," and reputed to have caused the death of thousands of men, women, and children, the firearm was a continuous subject for New Haven's wagging tongues who referred to the Winchester fortune as "blood money" and predicted retribution would have to be made.
Popular and petite Sarah, who weighed only ninety-five pounds and stood under five-feet tall, seems to have paid little attention, however, and she married William inf 1862. But several years later when her only child, Annie, died in infancy, and William, too, met an untimely death, she began to be plagued by the notion that the gossips had been right. Her loved ones were now being persecuted since they were face-to-face with all who had been slain by the Winchester rifle.
Concern for their welfair drove her to consult a Boston psychic hoping to have her fears put to res. Instead, the news was even more devastating. According to the medium, William and Annie were suffering the torments of the damned, but that was only a part of their fate. Their deaths had actually been engineered by vindictive forces, who were now planning to do away with Sarah since she was the present heir to the Winchester fortune.
There was only one ray of hope to avoid the clutches of the evil ones, Sarah was told. Their tactics were not condoned by all those felled by the rifle. Certain sources wished to make it known they were not only willing to forgive but to take on the task of protecting all family memebers from revenge-seeking entities if she would agree to move west (that part of the country most victimized by the rifle), buy a house for her descarnate friends, and keep building on it continuously in accordance to blueprints provided from above. As long as construction went on, she was assured, she would continue to live and the souls of her departed would rest in peace.
Why Sarah settled in an eightroom farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley farmhouse of San Jose is not clear. And there seems to be a dispute over why she gradually became so withdrawn that she refused to see anyone who came to the house (including President Teddy Roosevelt), or why she swathed herself in veils when dealing with all the household staff except her live-in secretary and niece, Margaret Marriam, and the Chinese butler who served their meals.